📰 China remains a threat: Army
•China, with its growing influence in the region, will remain a threat for India in the future, said Lt. Gen. Sarath Chand, Vice-Chief of Army Staff, on Tuesday even as he defended the comment of the Army Chief, General Bipin Rawat, on a “two-and-a-half front war”.
•His comments come in the backdrop of the continuing standoff between the two Armies at Doklam which began on June 16 after Chinese troops tried to build a road in the disputed territory.
•“China is expanding its influence across the Himalayas into our neighbourhood. Despite having the Himalayas between us, it is bound to be a threat for us in the years ahead,” Lt. Gen. Chand said, addressing a joint seminar organised by the Army’s Master General Ordnance and the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII).
•Last month, Gen. Rawat had said that the Army was “fully ready for a two and a half front war” — facing China, Pakistan and dealing with militancy simultaneously.
•Referring to the comments, Lt. Gen. Chand said, “He never meant to whip up war hysteria. He was merely stating a fact that we need to take care and we need to pay more attention to our security.”
Military modernisation
•Talking of China’s rapid military modernisation, he said a large portion of their defence spending remains undisclosed.
•In line with its modernisation, this year China has hiked defence spending to $152 billion, about three times that of India, but the real spend is estimated to be much higher.
On Pakistan
•On Pakistan, Lt. Gen. Chand said being a smaller country with smaller economy, it resorts to a “low-intensity conflict” with India rather than engage in a full-fledged war and said, “That suits its all-weather friend China.”
•He said Pakistan “stooped so low” by targeting schools and inflicting casualties on civilians along the Line of Control, and stated, “This is not something that we would do.”
•Stating that South Asia continues to be one of the most “volatile areas” in the world, he added, “India being at the centre of it is the security provider for this region.”
📰 India rejects OIC move on vigilantism
•India on Tuesday strongly rejected the resolutions of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) that had expressed concern about the recent attacks on people by cow-vigilante groups. An official statement from the Ministry of External Affairs stated that the resolutions adopted at the Organisation’s latest foreign ministers’ meeting were “factually incorrect”.
•“India notes with utmost regret that the Organisation of the Islamic Cooperation, during its 44th Session of the Council of Foreign Ministers , has again adopted certain resolutions which contain factually incorrect and misleading references to matters internal to India, including the Indian State of Jammu and Kashmir, which is an integral part of India. India outrightly rejects all such references,” said the statement.
•The MEA added, “the OIC has no locus standi on India’s internal affairs. We strongly advise the OIC to refrain from making such references in future.”
•The OIC noted that incidents of violence against the Muslim community were being committed by extremist Hindu groups and said it viewed such incidents “with grave concern”.
📰 ‘India’s concerns slowing RCEP talks’
•India’s reservations regarding the potential adverse impact of eliminating duties on its local manufacturing and job creation is understood to be slowing down the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) negotiations.
•The RCEP is a proposed mega Free Trade Agreement (FTA) involving 16 Asia Pacific nations including India and China, and aims, among other things, to liberalise investment norms in the region, besides boosting trade by dismantling most tariff and non-tariff barriers.
•The “slow pace” of negotiations was worrying, Phairush Burapachaisri, vice chairman, Board of Trade of Thailand and Thai Chamber of Commerce, told The Hindu here on Tuesday. “We hear that while most RCEP countries have agreed to quickly eliminate barriers affecting goods trade, India is seeking more time to do so, and that is delaying the negotiations,” said Mr. Burapachaisri, who attended stakeholder meetings held with the RCEP Trade Negotiating Committee on the sidelines of the RCEP negotiations. “The talks have already missed many deadlines and it looks like the negotiators won’t be able to conclude it this year. Asia Pacific is a fast growing region, but trade between countries in the region is affected by several barriers. If RCEP talks are not concluded quickly and these barriers are not eliminated, the region will miss out on many opportunities.”
•Meanwhile, Indian companies and industry bodies, including CII, flagged their concerns. The Centre’s ‘Make In India’ initiative to boost manufacturing and job creation could be hit by a hurried pact, they opined.
Widening trade gap
•Siddhartha Roy, economic advisor, Tata Group, said: “India’s trade deficit [annual] with RCEP nations is about $100 billion, and half of this is with China alone even without an FTA with China.”
•“Post India’s FTA with ASEAN, Japan and Korea [who are all RCEP members], our trade deficit with them have increased, and the government needs to take this into account during RCEP negotiations,” he said. “Eliminating duties under the RCEP will impact many sectors including steel, aluminium, auto-components, many engineering items and readymade garments.”
•CII Trade Policy Committee chairman Deep Kapuria said while many countries were urging greater focus on duty elimination, India ought to highlight the need for removal of non-tariff barriers including those in China.
📰 Govt. may not split Air India for stake sale
Officials fear investors may be put off
•The central government may not sell Air India’s domestic and international operations separately. “We are not willing to go back to the days of Air India and [erstwhile] Indian Airlines, as the disinvestment process may become unattractive,” a senior Aviation Ministry official, requesting anonymity, said.
•This might come as a hurdle to low-cost airline IndiGo’s plan to acquire its international operations.
•“AI’s business cannot be split merely based on an expression of interest from a single private player. If we sell lucrative assets separately, it will make the divestment of the domestic unit and subsidiaries tricky,” the official added.
•The government’s concern is that Air India’s valuation may further take a hit if it hives off Air India into two companies and invites bids for its domestic and international operations.
📰 Zero duty to hit Indian dairy industry: Amul
‘15 cr. farmers will be impacted by FTA’
•The Indian dairy sector, providing livelihood to 15 crore farmers, would be severely hit if import duties on milk and milk products were eliminated under any Free Trade Agreement (FTA) including the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), according to the local dairy cooperative Amul.
•Separately, farmers’ organisations have threatened to hold nationwide protests if the dairy sector is opened up under the RCEP — the proposed mega-regional FTA involving 16 Asia Pacific nations including India — or any other FTA including those proposed separately with Australia and New Zealand.
Risk of cheaper imports
•Jayen Mehta, senior general manager, GCMMF Ltd. (Amul), who participated in a stakeholders meeting with officials negotiating the RCEP agreement here, told The Hindu that it was important for India to ensure that duties on all Indian dairy products were not eliminated or reduced under the FTA, as cheaper imports risked threatening local farmers’ incomes from dairy.
•Significantly, Mr. Mehta pointed out that as against 15 crore dairy farmers in India, there were only 12,000 of them in New Zealand and 6,300 in Australia.
‘Duty offers protection’
•Currently, the duty on milk and milk products ranges from 40% to 60%, which gives the local industry enough protection to build its competitiveness.
•However, if the duty is drastically reduced or eliminated under any FTA, the local industry would find it difficult to compete against producers, particularly from RCEP members like Australia and New Zealand — which control more than 35% of the global dairy trade and in excess of 50% of the intra-RCEP trade, Mr. Mehta said.
•Yogendra Yadav of Swaraj Abhiyan and All India Kisan Sangharsh Coordination Committee, said, “Any attempt to open up our milk market to international trade under an FTA shall be resisted by all farmers’ organisations, and we will hold nationwide protests.”
📰 Transfer unclaimed accruals to fund: IRDA
Senior Citizen Welfare Fund to benefit
•Insurance companies can no longer retain unclaimed amounts of policyholders if those accruals are more than 10 years old. Such sums need to be, instead, transferred to the Senior Citizens’ Welfare Fund (SCWF) of the Centre.
•“All insurers having unclaimed amounts of policyholders for a period of more than 10 years as on September 30, 2017 need to transfer the same to the SCWF on or before March 1, 2018,” insurance regulator IRDAI said.
•The direction from the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India has come in the backdrop of the amendment made in April to the Senior Citizens’ Welfare Fund Rules. The amendment expanded the purview beyond the unclaimed amounts in small savings and other saving schemes of the Centre, PPF and EPF.
•It brought in unclaimed amount lying with banks, including cooperative banks and RRBs; dividend accounts, deposits and debentures of companies coming under the Companies Act; insurance companies and Coal Mines PF.
•Minister of State for Finance Santosh Kumar Gangwar had informed the Lok Sabha that unclaimed deposits as on March 31, 2016, with insurers (life and non-life) totalled Rs. 11,725.45 crore, rising sharply from the Rs. 7,227.23 crore in the previous year.
•Details as to how much of the unclaimed amounts was more than ten years were not immediately available. Unclaimed amounts include sum payable as death claim, maturity claim, survival benefit, premium due for refund and indemnity claims.
📰 In the age of data
Without strong data protection laws, privacy as a right will be of little value
•As India awaits the judgment of a nine-member Bench headed by Chief Justice J.S. Khehar on whether privacy is a fundamental right, the moment is ideal for the country to redefine and reconstruct some of the elementary definitions and laws associated with ‘privacy’.
•Here, it is important to look at the issue from both privacy as well as a national security perspectives. The present time period is said to be the ‘age of data’ with private companies — ranging from social media platforms to e-mail services and messaging applications — storing humongous volumes of information, a lot of it outside India’s borders. Both Facebook and WhatsApp have more than 200 million active users in India, with India recently surpassing the United States in terms of the number of Facebook users.
•Data-colonising companies like these use the collected information in myriad ways. Individuals have limited control over how data collected from them are used; in many cases, they do not even have undisputed ownership of their own personal information. Further, the companies’ databases are also under constant risk of cyberattacks. The likelihood of such scenarios has prompted technology evangelists like Nandan Nilekani to press for an immediate creation of stringent data protection laws.
EU regulation
•To protect the privacy of its individual users, the European Union is to implement the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in May 2018. Aimed at harmonising data privacy laws across Europe, it will impose stiff penalty of up to 4% of the company’s worldwide turnover in the event of a breach. Many companies will also have to ensure that even their vendors are fully compliant with the GDPR as a condition for running their businesses. Recognition of privacy as an individual right in India, without similar enforceable regulations, will be akin to raking water up a hill.
•Coming to collection of data by governments and agencies, we need to keep in mind that the Internet and the more virulent Darknet are being increasingly used these days by criminals and antisocial elements for illegal trade, trafficking and money laundering apart from recruitment to various terror outfits like the Islamic State (IS).
•Regulations that impinge on the effectiveness of our intelligence and law enforcement agencies as they battle these challenges would significantly compromise our social harmony and national security.
•Hence, what India needs more is effective data protection laws, along with strong independent watchdog institutions to ensure that the organisations handling our data do not go astray.
📰 For a hygienic track
The CAG report on the railways should compel a quick upgrade of passenger services
•Among the most affordable transport systems in the world, India’s railway network carries millions of people every day, linking the remotest destinations. Yet, in a fast-growing country with rising ambitions, the system is caught in a time warp, unable to scale up its services to global standards and hobbled by inefficient management. Although the rot in passenger services has been repeatedly identified, it has only grown worse. The report of the Comptroller and Auditor General on catering services for the year ended March 2016 provides further evidence that little has changed in the system: food unsuitable for human consumption, contaminated and recycled items, packaged articles past their use-by date, and unauthorised items are sold on trains, all endangering the health of passengers. Such gross violations are all the more glaring because the administration has instituted a mechanism to penalise agencies such as the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation and invites passengers to file complaints. Evidently, instances such as a Rs.1 lakh fine levied on the IRCTC for the presence of a cockroach in food supplied on the Kolkata Rajdhani Express three years ago have not resulted in any significant reform. Nor has private sector participation in food supply provided a panacea for the problems linked to departmental catering. It is unlikely, therefore, that the recently unveiled catering policy will make a big difference unless the process of identifying caterers, fixing prices, and ensuring quality control is transparent and is monitored by external auditors. Independent oversight can potentially improve other aspects of service as well, such as the quality and maintenance of linen, which the CAG has found to be shockingly substandard.
•The NDA government began its tenure with a focus on modernising India’s creaking railways, and several major announcements have been made, including the setting up of a long-pending Rail Development Authority to recommend tariffs and set standards. In the area of passenger services, any reform has to contend with the ‘open access’ character of rail travel in the country, since coaches are open to unlicensed vendors who sell food, water and other goods. Given the need for employment, it would be pragmatic to broaden the network and enrol more local distributors of certified articles, while implementing the core idea of the IRCTC running modern base kitchens. Audit findings of contractors on railway premises overcharging users and selling packaged food items at prices inflated over the open market are serious, and require immediate resolution. The experience with different models of service on trains in India merits a comparison with France, where unhappy passengers on the popular, high-speed TGV trains wanted public sector catering back a few years ago. Now that the CAG has given an exhaustive critique, it is imperative that the Railway Ministry brings about a visible change through its proposed reforms.
📰 Context of the contest
The role of the President or the Vice President does not extend to articulating a national philosophy of India
•Indian democracy is both rumbustious and fractious. Yet there are moments when contested democracy gives way to broad agreement and the camaraderie of the political class. The election to the posts of President and Vice President is one such occasion.
•On July 25, the newly elected President of India Ram Nath Kovind was sworn in at the Central Hall of Parliament. The function was attended by Members of Parliament cutting across party lines and Chief Ministers who represented different political persuasions. Earlier, last Sunday, a cross-section of MPs attended a touching farewell to outgoing President Pranab Mukherjee, a man associated with Indian parliamentary democracy since 1969.
•Not all those who attended both functions had voted for either President Kovind or President Mukherjee. Apart from one occasion, no choice of President has been unanimous. Though the election of 1969 involving V.V. Giri and Neelam Sanjeeva Reddy was by far the most bitterly contested, most other contests have been symbolic. Unsuccessful candidates have included C.D. Deshmukh, H.R. Khanna, K. Subba Rao, Tridib Chaudhuri, Bhairon Singh Shekhawat and P.A. Sangma — all distinguished individuals who would have made copybook occupants of Rashtrapati Bhavan. However, the mere fact that the presidency was contested didn’t either diminish the office or ensure unending controversy over the person of the Head of State. Regardless of the pre-history of the person who becomes the Rashtrapati, the respect and dignity of that office has always been maintained by all shades of political opinion. Apart from Giani Zail Singh, no President has ever been caught in the cross-currents of partisan politics.
•The reason is obvious. The holder of a constitutional office such as the President or Vice President is not expected to be another battering ram on behalf of the Prime Minister and the ruling dispensation. The Head of State is, above all, expected to adhere to the letter of the Constitution. The only occasion the President can somewhat exercise his discretion is in selecting the Prime Minister in the event of a fractured election verdict.
•As for Vice President, his principal role is that of Chairman of the Rajya Sabha and, by implication, overseeing the function of Rajya Sabha TV. His discretionary powers are limited to showing a little extra indulgence towards some of the more voluble MPs and, perhaps, giving the Treasury benches a little elbow room.
A misplaced debate
•In view of the defined roles for the President and Vice President, Peter Ronald deSouza’s spirited intervention (‘The Vice President’s Mien’, The Hindu, July 24) comes as a surprise. He argues that the forthcoming election for Vice President is, in effect, a “battle between two ideas of what India aspired to be during its struggle for freedom and what India should be.” He backs this up with the assertion that the values imbibed by individuals in a shakha of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh are totally at variance with the tradition of ethics and dharma that underpinned the Gandhian traditions of the national movement, and projects the contest as a rerun of the contest between Mahatma Gandhi and V.D. Savarkar, between an individual nurtured in the shakha that “debilitate(s) the mind” and the “grandson of both Rajaji and Gandhiji.”
•Prof. deSouza’s projection is a more erudite elaboration of former Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar’s claim of her contest with Mr. Kovind being a battle of ideologies. No doubt, he has grave misgivings of the larger political orientation of the Narendra Modi government. However, regardless of our individual characterisation of the government, I am baffled by Prof. deSouza’s claim that this has a bearing on who the MPs choose as the Vice President of India.
•The role of the President and Vice President has been rigidly defined by the Constitution. Fortunately, this role does not extend to articulating a national philosophy of India. If it did, the implications would be quite fearful. If, as Prof. deSouza contends, the battle is between noble and ignoble visions of what India stands for, does it imply that the latter would get short shrift under the Vice President of his choice? Given that the Modi government has a popular mandate until 2019, would the (unlikely) election of a Vice President blessed with both pedigree and dharma be the signal for a breakdown in relations between the Rajya Sabha Chairman and the government?
•The debate that Prof. deSouza has sought to trigger has a place. However, that place is at the hustings of a general election. By injecting this debate into the election of a constitutional post, he is advocating a complete subversion of the democratic political system. A President or Vice President with an agenda of waging a righteous civil war against an elected government belongs in the realms of putschist politics, not democracy.
📰 The crossroads at the Doklam plateau
India must calibrate both its message and military moves to keep Bhutan on track with the special bilateral ties
•There are many strings that tie Bhutan to India in a special and unique relationship, but none are as strong as the ones laid down on the ground: 1,500 km, to be precise, of roads that have been built by India across the Himalayan kingdom’s most difficult mountains and passes.
•Since 1960, when Bhutan’s King Jigme Wangchuk (the present King’s grandfather) entrusted the then Prime Minister, Jigme Dorji, with modernising the country, that had previously stayed closed to the world, those roads built and maintained by the Indian Border Roads Organisation (BRO) under Project Dantak have brought the countries together for more than one reason.
A one-way street?
•“All the new roads [they] proposed to construct were being aligned to run southwards towards India from the main centres of Bhutan. Not a single road was planned to be constructed to the Tibetan (Chinese) border,” recounted one of independent India’s pioneers in forging ties with Bhutan, Nari Rustomji, a bureaucrat who also served as the Dewan, or Prime Minister, of Sikkim from 1954 to 1959, in his book Dragon Kingdom in Crisis . When the Chinese presented a fork in the road, Rustomji said, “with feelers to bring Bhutan within the orbit of their influence”, Bhutan stood firm in “maintaining an independent stand”.
•Just a few years later, during the India-China war of 1962, Bhutan showed its sympathies definitely lay with India, but it still wouldn’t bargain on that independent stand: when Indian soldiers retreated from battle lines in Arunachal Pradesh, they were given safe passage through eastern Bhutan, but on the condition that soldiers would deposit their rifles at the Trashigang Dzong armoury, and travel through Bhutan to India unarmed. (The rifles lie there till today.)
•As India seeks to understand the Chinese government’s intentions in the Doklam stand-off, it would be obvious and natural to see them in the context of deteriorating relations between New Delhi and Beijing for the past three years, or in terms of China’s own global ambitions, and its need to show its Asian neighbours its muscular might. But any explanation that does not consider China’s desire to draw space between India and Bhutan in the ongoing stand-off will be inadequate, and simplistic at best.
•The first and most important clue to this is the area involved in the stand-off itself: the Doklam plateau is an area that China and Bhutan have long discussed, over 24 rounds of negotiations that began in 1984. In the early 1990s China is understood to have made Bhutan an offer that seemed attractive to the government in Thimphu: a “package deal” under which the Chinese agreed to renounce their claim over the 495-sq.-km disputed land in the Pasamlung and Jakarlung valleys to the north, in exchange for a smaller tract of disputed land measuring 269 sq. km, the Doklam plateau. Several interlocutors have confirmed that the offer was repeated by China at every round, something Bhutan’s King and government would relay to India as well. While India was able to convince Bhutan to defer a decision, things did change after India and Bhutan renegotiated their friendship treaty in 2007, and post-2008, when Bhutan’s first elected Prime Minister Jigme Thinley began to look for a more independent foreign policy stance. Some time during this period, the PLA is understood to have built the dirt track at Doklam that is at the centre of the current stand-off, including the “turning point”, and the Bhutanese army appears not to have objected to it then.
•During the next five years of his tenure, Mr. Thinley conducted more rounds of talks, including on the ‘Doklam package’, and even held a controversial meeting with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao (in Rio de Janeiro, 2012), suggesting that Bhutan was thinking of establishing consular relations with China, much to India’s chagrin. During this time, Bhutan also increased the number of countries with which it had diplomatic relations from 22 to 53, and even ran an unsuccessful campaign for a non-permanent seat at the UN Security Council.
•By 2013, India took matters in hand, and the Manmohan Singh government’s decision to withdraw energy subsidies to Bhutan on the eve of its general elections that summer contributed to Jigme Thinley’s shock defeat. When the new Prime Minister Tshering Tobgay’s government prepared his first round of boundary talks with Beijing a few months later, New Delhi took no chances. It dispatched both National Security Adviser Shivshankar Menon and Foreign Secretary Sujatha Singh to Thimphu to brief him. China, it would seem, realised it could no longer press the Doklam point, and a year later even offered India the Nathu La pass route through Sikkim for Kailash-Mansarovar yatris.
•With the latest stand-off, that includes the cancellation of the Nathu La route, China appears to be back in the eastern great game that Bhutan has become, or an “egg between two rocks”, as a senior Bhutanese commentator described it. India must also consider that the PLA road construction that brought Indian troops to Bhutanese territory may be what is known as a “forcing move” in chess. By triggering a situation where Indian soldiers occupy land that isn’t India’s for a prolonged period, Beijing may have actually planned to show up India’s intentions in an unfavourable light to the people of Bhutan.
•The government must see that Bhutan’s sovereignty is no trivial matter, and avoid flippant comments as the one made by the Ministry of External Affairs last week, likening the question of whether Bhutan had sought the help of Indian troops at the tri-junction to “whether the ball came first… or the batsman had taken a stand before the ball was bowled”. The question does matter to Bhutanese people, and although their government has put out a gag request to newspapers on the Doklam stand-off for now, blog posts and social media write-ups by respected commentators indicate there is much disquiet over the idea that Indian and Chinese troops may occupy the plateau in a tense stalemate for months. It cannot have escaped South Block’s notice that the only statement issued by the Bhutanese Foreign Ministry during this time makes no mention of a “distress call” to India, only of its demarche to China. Finally, New Delhi would do well to refrain from differentiating between political factions inside Bhutan, unlike what it has done in Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, and recognise that there is no “anti-India” faction in Bhutan, even if some are calling for the establishment of ties with China.
In full view of neighbours
•India must also be aware that other neighbours are watching the Doklam stand-off closely. It would be short-sighted not to recognise that Bhutan is at one tri-junction with India and China, but Nepal, Myanmar and Pakistan too have tri-junctions (at least on the map) with both countries, and China’s reference to “third country” presence in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir is putting a spotlight on all of these. Bhutan is also the only country in the region that joined India in its boycott of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s marquee project, the Belt and Road Initiative. In China’s thinking, any reconsideration of Bhutan’s unique ties with India, forged all those decades ago in asphalt and concrete, would be not only a prize, but possible payback.
•While Indian commentary has focused on the Narendra Modi government’s bilateral problems with Beijing, and India’s larger problems with China’s aggressive stance on the international stage, the truth is, this crisis is as much about the crossroads Bhutan finds itself at. India must calibrate both its message and its military moves in order to keep Bhutan on track with the special ties they share.
📰 ‘Weak public institutions best way to ensure social injustice’
The political scientist on the danger to India’s checks and balances, and the perils of the democratisation of mediocrity in universities
•Professor of political science and a holder of the Madan Lal Sobti Chair, Devesh Kapur has been director of the Center for the Study of Contemporary India at University of Pennsylvania since 2006. Mr. Kapur, who recently co-edited Public Institutions in India: Performance and Design, says our public universities have failed in fostering a spirit of inquiry, curiosity, tolerance and excellence among students. Excerpts:
•You have said you could see the making of a perfect storm in India.
•In the next few decades, we will see a youth bulge with a skewed sex ratio, one where people, the young people, have ostensible credentials but no real skills or knowledge because of how bad our education system is. So they have expectations and aspirations which are not going to be met. If you were very poor like in the past, life was short and brutish. But not now. And then add to it employment in the face of technological change which in every area requires fewer workers. All of this is coming together with a background of weak, if not weakening, public institutions to manage this. If you see institutions as mediating societal tensions, conflicts, this is what worries me the most about us.
Why do we have a scant regard for public institutions?
•In some ways, everywhere public institutions are challenged. Under the Trump regime, White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon wants to dismantle the administrative state. In the end all institutions are some form of checks and balances, but if those in power do not want those checks and balances and they get re-elected repeatedly, then over time there is erosion and — I want to emphasise this — this is across political parties. The Left, the Socialists, the caste-based parties and the regional parties and the national parties, all have to share the blame for this.
•If you think of universities, especially public universities, as public institutions, what is amazing is that one cannot think of a single political party that had the least vision of higher education. After all, education is a concurrent subject, right? So, even if the Central government has a particular stance or non-stance, the States could have intervened.
•Look at the way our vice chancellors are selected. Many of them would not get a job as a lecturer in a decent college. There are reasons to believe that at least in some cases, they have paid their way there. Between 2000 and 2015, we set up almost six new colleges a day, every single day over 15 years including weekends. At its peak, the U.S., with way greater resources, set up one new college a week. And this, when we have the most regulated higher education system… the UGC (University Grants Commission), AICTE (All India Council for Technical Education), etc.
But hasn’t the creation of universities and colleges opened access to those who didn’t have it in the first place?
•I think you can create all these universities and frame the rules. But the underlying ethos of higher education is a spirit of inquiry, a spirit of curiosity, a spirit of tolerance, a spirit that says excellence is important. In that sense higher education should be elitist. It should not be elitist by who enters, but in its intellectual ambitions. To push the frontiers of knowledge, you have to have high standards. The idea that you get grace marks to pass… what does that mean? Even the role of the courts. In fact, you could argue that if you look at the judges and many of the ways they write the judgments, it shows you what ails our education system.
But surely, that is linked to who the government selects?
•Here is the tragedy. We have the second or third largest country of people with college degrees in the world. Everywhere, whether public or private institutions, we have a shortage of talent. You know that old poem? Water, water everywhere, not a drop to drink. We have graduates, graduates everywhere, but who do I hire? Yet we are setting up more IITs.
There are a few universities that are doing well…
•Very few, they are islands of excellence. But for the bulk of our population, public universities will, and should, continue to be very important. But we seem to be writing them off. Other than the very elite narrow technical institutes like IITs and AIIMS and IIMs, these have reduced what the purpose of education means to a basic functional instrument. Isse aap ko achchi naukri milegi (you will get a good job). They are not about thinking about the larger purpose of higher education. Does it make us better citizens? Does it make us think us broadly about the society we are embedded in, what we take from it and owe it?
•It is unclear why you cannot say that if you go to this institution, you must serve in some public function for two years after you graduate. In South Korea, Singapore and other countries, for many decades they had a compulsory draft regardless of your background. If you want to create a sense of genuine nationalism, of service to the nation, that’s where it begins. It doesn’t begin in sloganeering. Why shouldn’t IIT graduates be sent to help out panchayats with technical expertise?
•If you look at public loans for higher education, they were about Rs. 300 crore in 2000. Now they are Rs. 72,000 crore, the fastest-growing NPAs (non-performing assets) in the banking system. Basically, these moneys go to private colleges, many are run by politicians, teaching rubbish and in the end, the public sector will pay in any case. There will be a lot of pressure to write off loans. They did serve a good purpose in making education accessible to a large number of students. But it is not clear if democratisation of mediocrity will serve our society well. There has been a massive elite exodus. How many children of our senior politicians, bureaucrats study here?
What ails our public institutions?
•One of the extraordinary things is how undermanned they are. It’s not only about shortage of personnel in numbers, we have a shortage in quality. Partly I think this whole thing of everything at the top being reserved for the IAS, IPS has to go.
•There has to be much more sifting; after 20 years of service, one-third of them have to leave on the performance scale. The same thing has happened with our universities. Our universities are like the civil service, they are like babudom . Whether I work or not, I am going to basically go with time.
Aren’t you being elitist here?
•Whenever someone questions this, you will immediately be attacked as elitist. Ironically, weak public institutions are the best way to ensure social injustice. Who needs strong public institutions? It is the weak, not the strong. The strong will always be able to buy their way, whether it is education, police protection. The irony is in the name of social justice, we have undermined the very social justice we have claimed we were doing this for.
So, what do we do?
•The biggest hypocrisy is self-delusion. We always say the West is individualistic. We are one of the most individual societies — the idea of the collective good where the collective is large is absent. We are becoming more ghettoised, not less. I come back to the universities, which is where the young people are on the verge of adulthood. The first time you are meeting people from different parts of the country. Ideas are shaped. That’s the last time you are going to be open-minded. The pretences go away slowly.
•Look at the faculty of our public universities. Look at West Bengal. The first two Chairs — and by the way, back then it was private money — at Calcutta University: in physics, it was C.V. Raman, and in philosophy, it was S. Radhakrishnan. Go to the university now… all completely Bengalis. The parochialism that comes with that is frightening. We have gone backwards in a serious way. One of the things we should do in our Central universities is besides reservation, insist that half the students come from outside. We have stopped thinking about the larger role universities play in public life.
•How do you see the stifling of dissent on campuses in the name of nationalism? For instance, in the context of what happened in Jawaharlal Nehru University.
The genuine conundrum we face is, if you are in a research programme funded by public money, what should be your role? Should it be activism or research?
•Research is not a part-time activity. Din bhar morcha kiya, raat ko do ghanta kaam kiya (Take part in protests through the day, do precious little at night). Good research requires tremendous commitment over a sustained period of time. You cannot get around it. That is the bottom line. An ordinary taxpayer may say, main kyon paise doon (why should I pay)? Or from the point of view of the young person: there are so many injustices, do you want me to keep aloof? I think there is an inherent tension we should recognise.
•But I do think… going back to the JP (Jayaprakash Narayan) movement, he had called students to protest. It seemed nice then. But look what it did to public universities in north India. It destroyed them. What became of the movement is that university politics became the springboard for political ambitions.
Why has our cultural debate become about Us versus Them?
•Partly there is a very distinct feeling from the Right that we were deliberately excluded. That it is our turn. Unfortunately, they don’t get Gandhi’s adage that an eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind. Vengeance may give you short-term pleasure, but it is not a recipe for building but for pulling down. Then you get into Us versus Them. Both sides are Indians. There is no us, them. This is our country, right? You see this in the U.S. where we see a tribalism on display. We have been sowing very poisonous seeds. We should be trying twice as hard to not be divisive. We should prepare our roofs now. We can’t do when the storm comes. By then we will be reaping what we are sowing now, and we should think very carefully what exactly we will be harvesting.
